Course Introduction
What is strategy? When your friend tells you that his "strategy" in basketball is to win, he is not telling you a strategy at all. A strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a goal. A more appropriate strategy for a basketball game would be: "I will apply defensive pressure and force the opposing team to make mistakes with the end goal of winning the game". In this course, you will learn that you must first clearly define your goals before developing strategies to achieve them. Strategy in business is similar to sports, war, or politics; the parallels are so close that early business strategists studied military strategy in depth. The science of strategy development has developed beyond this by now, but similarities still exist.
Strategic management involves two processes: first, the process of identifying specific goals for a firm and designing strategies to achieve those goals, and second, the process of implementing those strategies. It is easy to say that your goal is to increase sales by 50% in three years, but how do you achieve that goal? Are you going to lower prices, acquire a competitor, move into other businesses, or do something else? Assuming you are going to lower prices, how will you do so and keep profits up? These are the sorts of questions that strategists must answer.
This course is the capstone of Saylor Academy's Business Administration program because it incorporates elements from all of the other courses in the program. If you have taken those courses already, almost every topic in this course should be familiar to you, but Strategic Management ties them all together. This course begins with an introduction to the field and defines some important terms and concepts. You will then identify goals and formulate strategies before addressing implementation. This course concludes with strategies for the 21st century.